11.28.05 - You've got to
hand it to Dick Cheney - no other modern politician has come so close to
perfecting the theater of the absurd. Even as he protests his innocence of
lying about matters of state, he lies about matters of state.

In two major speeches
Friday and Monday, the vice president - who has long insisted Saddam Hussein
and al-Qaida were allies, Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction, we would be greeted as liberators in Baghdad and the Iraqi insurgency is in
its 'last throes" - again evidenced his trademark inability to speak the
truth.

Continuing the
administration's recent shrill defensive barrage over whose fault the Iraq mess
is and with the truth chasing the lies in full public view, Cheney had the gall
to smear the war's critics as 'corrupt and shameless." Then, within a few
sentences, he showed again why 52 percent of those recently polled by Newsweek
believe Cheney deliberately "misused or manipulated" prewar intelligence.

First, he shamelessly
repeated the absurd notion that a bum-rushed Congress, most of which does not
have high security clearance, was privy to the same intelligence as he and his
war-salesmen allies. In fact, not only was Cheney and his staff poring over the
classified testimonials of an array of known liars, forgers, drunks,
opportunists and desperate exiles we now know supplied White House
speechwriters with their best lines, he also had access to the intelligence
community's combined disclaimers, rebuttals and outright denunciations of these
sources and their conveniently tawdry tales.

"Yes, more than 100
Democrats voted to authorize him to take the nation to war," wrote former
Sen. Bob Graham, D-Fla., in a devastating statement in The Washington Post on
Sunday. 'Most of them, though, like their Republican colleagues, did so in the
legitimate belief that the president and his administration were truthful in
their statements that Saddam Hussein was a gathering menace - that if Hussein
was not disarmed, the smoking gun would become a mushroom cloud."

Graham, then the top
Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, says the declassified version of
the National Intelligence Estimate was a sham. "It represented an
unqualified case that Hussein possessed (WMD), avoided a discussion of whether
he had the will to use them and omitted the dissenting opinions contained in
the classified version," writes Graham.

Parsed out, Cheney's
recent statements amount to a defensive claim the Bush administration didn't
lie so much as it was just calamitously incompetent, too eager for invasion to
bother to do its due diligence.

The reality, however, is
that while the Yalie president may not be the brightest star on the horizon,
the owlish Cheney is nobody's dummy. What he is, and has always been, is the
most bald-faced of the administration's war hustlers, shamelessly peddling, for
example, the cloak-and-dagger tale of a Hussein operative meeting with 9-11
hijacker Mohamed Atta in Prague, in the Czech Republic, long after U.S.
intelligence had dismissed it.

Similarly, it was Cheney
who was instrumental in getting Colin Powell to make the astonishing claims of
the intelligence source code-named "Curveball" the centerpiece of the
secretary of state's prewar presentation to the United Nations. Now, thanks to
a definitive investigation by the Los Angeles Times published Sunday, we find
out that top German intelligence sources in charge of interrogating Curveball
had already declared him an unreliable source.

'We were shocked," a
high-level German intelligence officer told the Times. "Mein Gott! We had
always told (the United
States) it was not
proven - it was not hard intelligence."

But perhaps the most
outrageous lie Cheney and the White House kept - and keep - making is that
invading Iraq was a sensible part of the
response to 9-11.

'In February 2002, after
a briefing on the status of the war in Afghanistan, the commanding officer,
Gen. Tommy Franks, told me the war was being compromised as specialized personnel
and equipment were being shifted from Afghanistan to prepare for the war in
Iraq - a war more than a year away," noted Graham on Sunday. 'Even at this
early date, the White House was signaling that the threat posed by Saddam
Hussein was of such urgency that it had priority over the crushing of al-Qaida."

In making his continued
one-man jihad against the facts, Cheney is apparently throwing Hail Mary passes
to that part of the Republican base which will believe anything it is told -
having already lost the trust of the majority of Americans.

But as Rep. John Murtha
said in response to the slander by a Republican congresswoman that he, a
decorated Vietnam combat veteran, is a coward for
arguing for the quick and complete withdrawal from Iraq: "You can't spin this.
You've got to have a real solution. This is not a war of words, this is a
war."